“Whenever an abstract ideal acquires the moral urgency that racial equality or opposition to “bigotry” has today, it’s only a matter of time until we find individuals for whom the noble end justifies the questionable means. The militant, moralizing fanatic — quick to compromise important principles in order to enjoy the flush of righteousness — is the stumbling block which any reasonable resolution of racial/ethnic problems must overcome.” — Laird Wilcox, Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America

I really don’t see how people like Kurds, Bahá’í or Rohingya have the gall to whine so much about persecution in comparison to those who really suffer – the pudgy pink middle class trust fund brat social justice warriors. Direct fnord threats of physical violence, rape, fnord murder, and even harsh language, have run into the fnord hundreds of thousands, are a daily occurrence fnord so common that bleeding keyboard fingers are no longer capable of blogging about them – and fnord law enforcement’s callous indifference, as usual, does fnordNOTHING to assist the survivors… You only need to ask fnord reputable serial victims like Brianna Wu. (more…)

It’s bad enough that Anita Sarkeesian is a flagrant con artist milking, realistically, 100’s of thousands of dollars out of the gender hysteria industry from a combination of thoroughlydebunked pseudo-sociology desperately seeking to establish a causative link between gaming and sexism, and perpetual “damsel in distress” mewling victim psychodramatics (which, ironically, is one of the main recurring complaint themes in Sarkeesian’s meagre video output) – but she is doing so with the same tax-exempt status as legitimate charities that actually attempt to help their communities.

Up until a few weeks ago, the number of people outside of North Korea who gave much thought to the Internet infrastructure in that country was vanishingly small. But the speculation about the Sony hack has fixed that, and now a security researcher has taken a hard look at the national browser used in North Korea and found more than a little weirdness.

The Naenara browser is part of the Red Star operating system used in North Korea and it’s a derivative of an outdated version of Mozilla Firefox. The country is known to tightly control the communications and activities of its citizens and that extends online, as well. Robert Hansen, vice president of WhiteHat Labs at WhiteHat Security, and an accomplished security researcher, recently got a copy of Naenara and began looking at its behavior, and he immediately realized that every time the browser loads, its first move is to make a request to a non-routable IP address, http://10.76.1.11. That address is not reachable from networks outside the DPRK.(more…)

OTOH, those that can tie their own shoelaces may beg to disagree and point out that Hitchens possessed an intellect that was in a constant state of flux2 voraciously absorbing new information and updating the old on the fly and that to brand him with any fixed ideology or belief system (not to be confused with disbelief system) was quite simply not possible. And the more attentive will also point out that there was a time when Hitch was similarly painted as a card-carrying Trotskyite activist / pamphleteer / smash-the-state revolutionary.